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Freedom to Learn

One of the tragedies of our system of schooling is that it deflects students from discovering what they truly love and find worth doing for its own sake. Instead, it teaches them that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others' judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments.

I begin with a true and tragic story. Many years ago I was a graduate student conducting research in one of the top biopsychology laboratories in the country. The lab chief was one of a handful of the world’s most prominent research psychologists at that time, and many in the lab believed he was headed for a Nobel Prize. ...

Parents reports indicate that most ADHD-diagnosed kids do fine without drugs if they are not in a conventional school). ADHD-diagnosed kids seem to do especially well when they are allowed to take charge of their own education.

The brains of people diagnosed with ADHD are no doubt different from those of other people, but that doesn't make ADHD a "disorder." ADHD (except in extreme cases) is only a disorder to the degree that we, as a society, fail to tolerate impulsiveness and fail to provide environmental conditions in which people with widely differing personality characteristics can make best use of their strengths and learn how to compensate for their weaknesses.

Most ADHD diagnoses in children are initiated because of inattention or disruptive behavior in school. To date there has been no research at all on ADHD in children who do not attend a conventional school. If you have (or are) an ADHD-diagnosed school-aged child doing homeschooling, unschooling, free schooling, or some other form of unconventional schooling, I invite you to post or send me that story. I will analyze the stories qualitatively and quantitatively and present the results soon on this blog.

One out of every eight school-aged boys in the United States has a diagnosis of ADHD. If just teachers' ratings were used for the diagnoses, that proportion would be one out of every four! How can that be? The answer to that question is not unlike the answer to this question: Why do so many monkeys in cages look so abnormal?

Many years ago, as part of my early studies of the Sudbury Valley School, I sat in on a school meeting. The main agenda item had to do with a complaint made about a new student who had been coming to school wearing a leather jacket with a swastika painted on it. At most schools this kind of offence would be quickly and efficiently handled by the principal, who would call the student into his or her office and order the student to remove the jacket and never bring it back to school. But that's not how Sudbury Valley handles things. Sudbury Valley has no principal. It is run--entirely run--in democratic fashion by the School Meeting, which includes all students (age 4 on through high-school age) and staff members together. The debate I heard that day was one befitting the Supreme Court of the United States.

Let's say you are 15 years old, or 13, or 11, and for some reason--over which you have no control--you have been singled out by your schoolmates as an object for scorn and humiliation. Every day at school, for you, is another day in hell. No matter how you feel about school and how terribly you are treated there, the law requires you to be there. What ...

Math. As a society we worship it, hate it, and fear it. In our schools we force kids to study it (or pretend to study it) for thousands of hours and then we wail about how little they learn. Here, now, are reports from "unschoolers" that tell a different story. Math is fun; math is easily and naturally learned as a tool when needed; and kids who want to go to a ...

Early in the twentieth century, L. P. Benezet, superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire, performed an outrageous experiment. He prohibited the teaching of arithmetic in the first five grades (grades 1-5) in some of the elementary schools in Manchester's poorest neighborhoods.

The general assumption in our culture is that children must be taught to read, but the experiences of "unschooling" families and of people involved in the Sudbury school movement prove otherwise. Here, based on stories submitted by parents, are seven principles relevant to the question of how children teach themselves to read without formal instruction.

Rates of depression and anxiety among American children and adolescents have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today five to eight times as many young people meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century ago or more. Why?

As you know if you have been following it for awhile, this blog is primarily about self-education, especially in children but also in adults. It's about learning that occurs through play, self-directed exploration, and self-initiated focused effort. The comments and emails I have received over the past few months suggest that many of you have stories to tell that are quite relevant to these themes. I would love to hear and perhaps share your stories, which can be about your children, others you know, or you. Your stories may be a great source of inspiration for other readers.

You are a big-league baseball pitcher. The opposing pitcher has been throwing hard inside fastballs and has hit one of the batters on your team--maybe deliberately, maybe not. Should you retaliate by hitting their best batter with a high inside fastball? To do so is to deliberately risk injuring a fellow human being.

In his famous Robbers Cave experiment, Muzafer Sherif invited two groups of boys at a summer camp to engage in a sports tournament for valued prizes. As he predicted, the tournament led to serious animosity between the two groups and ultimately to a condition resembling inter-tribal warfare. How did this happen?

Imagine an old-fashioned sandlot game of baseball. A bunch of kids of various ages show up at the vacant lot. They've come on foot or by bicycle. Someone brought a bat and ball (which may or may not be an actual baseball), and several came with fielders' gloves. They decide to play a game.&nbsp; ...

In nonhuman animals, play and contests are sharply distinguished. Play is cooperative and egalitarian, and contestests are antagonisitic and aimed at establishing dominance. Hunter-gatherer humans accentuated play and avoided contests in order to maintain the high degree of cooperation and sharing that was essential to their way of life. In our society, with our competitive games, we often confound play and contest. What might be the consequeces of this for children's development?

If American football were a food additive or a drug, it would be banned by the FDA. Or, if financial interests prevented its banning, its package would at least carry a surgeon general's warning: Football causes brain damage. The evidence that football causes brain damage is now indisputable. But the deleterious effects of our strong focus on winning go beyond football and brain damage. The compulsioin to win, in general, may be bad for our health.

Because neighbors don't know one another as they once did, parents' fears of "strangers" in the neighborhood has helped to cause a sharp decline in children's free outdoor neighborhood play. Here is a proposal for bringing neighbors together and creating safe, neighborhood play-and-learning centers that everyone can enjoy. We may actually do this, as a pilot project, in a neighborhood already selected. Please read on, and supply your ideas for improving the project.

Have you ever seen the Handbook of Child Psychology? Amazingly, this 5000 page work, billed as the authoritative summary of all of child psychology, has almost nothing to say about children's playfulness and curiosity. How can that be? Here's my theory.

Children educate themselves. Children are biologically built for self-education. Their instincts to explore; to observe; to eavesdrop on the conversations of their elders; to ask countless questions; and to play with the artifacts, ideas, and skills of the culture all serve ...

Let's speak honestly, without euphemisms. Compulsory education means forced education, and forced education means that schools are prisons. The question worth debating is this: Is forced education a good thing or a bad thing? Most people seem to believe that it is, all in all, a good thing...

Willingham's new book, "Why Don't Students Like School?, utterlly fails to answer the question posed by it's title. &nbsp;Really, why don't students like school? &nbsp;The answer is obvious: School is prison.

As I write this essay, children and adolescents all over America are frantically completing their assigned summer reading, so they can turn in their book reports, due on the first day of class. Or, they are blowing off the assignments while their parents are frantically trying to get them to do them. If your child fails to turn in those reports, you may be blamed...

Here are six ways to become a more trustful parent and to grant your children more freedom: (1) Examine your own values and priorities, and think how they relate to your interactions with your children. (2) Let go of the idea that you can determine your child’s future or are responsible for it. (3) ...

Why is trustful parenting so much more difficult than in decades past? Why are today's children afforded less freedom than we were when we were children? In this essay I suggest five reasons: (1) the decline of neighborhoods; (2) the decline in adults' firsthand knowledge of child development and the worldwide sharing of fears; (3) the increased ...

What about your childhood? What memories do you have of adventures that would be forbidden by most parents today? Here are some of Hillary Clinton's childhood memories, and some of my own. I thank my parents and the whole community that made such adventures possible, and I imagine that Hillary thanks her parents and community too.

Trustful parenting sends messages to children that were consistent with the needs of hunter-gatherer bands and are also consistent with societal needs today: You are competent. You have eyes and a brain and can figure things out. You know your own abilities and limitations. .

Our society's concepts of raising and training children assume a dominant-subordinate relationship between parent and child. The parent---or teacher or other parent substitute---is in charge and is responsible for the child's actions. The child's primary duty, at least in theory, is to obey. Hunter-gatherers had a very different, more playful approach to parenting.

My reading about life in many different hunter-gatherer cultures has led me to conclude that their work is play for four main reasons: (1) It is varied and requires much skill and intelligence. (2) There is not too much of it. (3) It is done in a social context, with friends. And (4) (most significantly) it is ....

About Freedom to Learn

Children come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves. These include the drives to play and explore. This blog is primarily about these drives and ways by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than suppress them.